Ever since he stopped releasing albums under the name “Smog” and took his own name, critics and audiences have wondered where Bill Callahan’s career was heading and if meaningful change would come from this switch.
His first” solo” album, Woke On A Whaleheart was the exploration of a series of ideas and desires, namely Callahan’s role within his own music and the constraints of a defined sound. By switching to his real name, he hoped to make music in a different way, delegating more duties to others and being more of a performer, with his collaborators doing the arrangements and helping in the composition (a reversal of the more conventional approach, which is that artists going solo take a more involved approach). The album’s producer and arranger, Neil Michael Hagerty, remarked that with this approach, he’d get the chance to make Callahan record the album he’d always wanted to hear him sing on. Judging by the critical performance of the album, what Neil Hagerty wants to hear and what Smog fans want to hear are wholly different things. Though the album’s reception was not negative, it was generally understood to be a competent but light work. It didn’t seem to fit quite well within Callahan’s career; he’d been moving away from his noisier, experimental roots and more towards American traditions, but Whaleheart was extremely traditional, somewhat derivative, and much different in tone to the more melancholic earlier albums. What no one knew was whether this was the new path that Callahan was taking, or if it was a detour.
For Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle, things have changed. Callahan is more involved in its composition, more willing to put his defining traits in the material, less open to variety. It is evident from the music, and corroborated by him, that perhaps what led to the creation of Woke On A Whaleheart was tied to that very specific time and those preoccupations, and it had to be left behind. This is not to say that the lessons learned by Woke On A Whaleheart are not put to use on this recording. The record is clearly close to its predecessor, and the Callahan discography starts making sense in its own way, much like the Smog discography makes sense even accounting for its dramatic evolution.
Here is a melancholic, lonely album, a series of vignettes on love, pain, unrest, and longing. The arrangements are immediately striking: earlier recordings dabbled in a variety of sounds and moods, but they’ve never sounded quite so vulnerable or delicate. Where on earlier records, strings were ominous and overdramatic, here they’re whimsical and fragile. The retro leanings of Whaleheart are almost wholly absent; there is no mimicry or genre-dabbling whatsoever. The record is a return to thematic unity. Much like A River Ain’t Too Much To Love was replete with river imagery, Eagle is, as the title indicates, centered around birds. There is also the question of life’s influence on the record. Many have speculated that Callahan’s former relationship with Joanna Newsom makes this a break-up record. It is not clear from the album that this is the case, at least intentionally. But it is inevitable that his lyrical concerns might veer towards what’s on his mind at the current time. Whatever the inner reasons are, whatever is on his mind, the results are some of the most beautiful (arguably some of the only beautiful) songs Callahan was written.
Opener “Jim Cain” finds Callahan taking on the role, and relating to, author James Cain, singing of life not coming out as planned in an accepting (uplifting, even) tone. His guitar melodies are reminiscent of A River, with this and other songs building off from a very basic repeated melody, but now backed by tasteful strings. In “Eid Ma Clack Shaw”, he explores the restlessness of the mind, its subject clearly struggling to move forward from his past, haunted and tired, and believing he’s seen “the perfect song” in his dreams, an incoherent string of nonsense. The record’s highlight is “Rococo Zephyr”, its melody slightly reminiscent of A River’s “Say Valley Maker”, but now supported by soft backup keys and string arrangements that buzz like hummingbirds. It’s the one true moment of happiness in the album, a memory of love: “She lay beside me like a branch from a tender willow tree/I was as still, as still as a river could be/When a rococo zephyr swept over her and me”. It is almost too happy. His romantic narratives tend to have cynical or humorous undercurrents, but here the sentiment is laid bare.
Perhaps the most striking moments of thematic unity come from the pair of songs “Too Many Birds” and “All Thoughts Are Prey To Some Beast”, both of which explore similar ideas through a different perspective. In “Too Many Birds”, a viewer observes birds atop a tree, focusing his attention on the one bird that is unable to find a spot: “Turns around in hopes to find the place it last knew rest/Oh black bird, over black rain burn/This is not where you last knew rest/You fly all night to sleep on stone/The heartless rest that in the morn, we’ll be gone”, he sings mournfully. In “All Thoughts Are Prey To Some Beast”, the imagery is similar, but now the bird is not a meek loner, but a forceful one: “An eagle came over the horizon and shook the branches with its sight / The softer thoughts: starlings, finches, and wrens / The softer thoughts, they all took flight”. They both end on a similar note, that of a bird flying on its own. But the attitudes are different, of course: where the first bird is an unfortunate, lost soul, the second bird is a destructive force. The arrangements on the song are more forceful than usual. Though he’s dabbled in loud instrumentation before, the production was always done in such a way that the impact of the backing music was subdued. Here, the arrangements pack a stronger punch: the kicks in “Birds”, the percussion in “All Thoughts Are Prey”, they’re all at the foreground. Perhaps this is part of the idea of Callahan being a part of the music going on around him (carried from Whaleheart).
The record’s conclusion is less successful. “Faith/Void”, at 9:44, is one of Callahan’s longest compositions (there are similarly long songs on his earlier, experimental work, but the less said about those, the better), and it does not sustain its strenght. For once, the arrangements actually threaten to overwhelming Callahan while underwhelming the listener; there are beautiful strings and guitar strums every so often, but they tend to turn bombastic within a few minutes. None of this would be problematic if the song’s lyrics were strong, but they are disconnected from the overall feel of the rest of the album. They deal with Callahan’s rejection of faith and the end of a search for inner peace, but there is no real narrative, and the content is much too repetitive considering the length. After a solid collection of songs exploring variations of the same ideas in poetic and inventive ways, a mantra of “it’s time to put God away” feels much less interesting.
The great success of this album is conclusively showing Callahan’s abilities to do new things and explore new feelings without losing what people consider his more established strenghts. In this sense, it is a return to form for those who considered Woke On A Whaleheart to be uncomfortable territory for him. It is a great album by an artist that still has many in him.